Montague Ullman: A Self-Portrait

Editor's Introduction:
Dreams are such ordinary experiences that for a long time their research
potential was ignored by American parapsychologists until Montague Ullman,
M.D., a New York psychiatrist and psychoanalyst (his own interest in dream
experiences having been aroused in a clinical setting with his patients),
stimulated research interest in others. This development is apparent from the
frequent references in the dream literature to his dream work at the Dream
Laboratory of the Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, which he established
in 1962. His work virtually constitutes the one source of experimental evidence
that the content of dreams may be affected by tele­pathy.

The association between dreams
and paranormal phenomena has been recorded time and time again. For example, in
1931 the BSPR reported on a questionnaire sent to 10,000 people listed in Who's
Who in America and noted that 25 percent of the paranormal experiences occurred
in dreams. After study­ing the Parapsychology Laboratory's collection of
spontaneous cases, Louisa Rhine found that the great majority of paranormal
experiences occurred in the form of dreams. The relationship between dreams and
the paranormal per­suaded many students of parapsychology that dreams had a
great deal to say that was significant about the paranormal. But
parapsychologists could only daydream about dreams because it was not possible
to make dreams speak experimentally: There was no way of investigating the
association between dreams and the paranormal in the absence of any method to
determine if a subject was dreaming while sleeping.

Dr. Ullman helped parapsychology
make one of its great advances of the past quarter century by utilizing a
physiological method for monitoring dreams. He used the EEG to record brain
waves and the Rapid-Eye-Movement technique to record eye movements. These
techniques permitted Ullman, in his experimental studies, to know when sleeping
subjects were dreaming and the length of the dreams. He was then able, during
the dreams, to have agents use target pictures in an attempt to influence
telepathically the content of the dreams. The subjects, awakened as soon as
their dreams ended, tape recorded their dream imagery and their accounts later
were blind-matched by judges against the target pictures.

Besides having made possible a
nocturnal approach to ESP, Dr. Ullman coedited the Proceedings of the
International Conference on Hypnosis, Drugs, Dreams and Psi (1968), and was
an associate editor of Wolman's Handbook of Parapsychology (1977). He has made
contributions to the parapsychological and nonparapsychological literature and
coauthored with Stanley Krippner Dream Studies and Telepathy: An
Experimental Approach (1970), with Stanley Krippner and Alan Vaughan Dream
Telepathy (1973), and with Nan Zimmerman Working with Dreams (1979).

A former fellow of the American
Association for the Advancement of Science, Dr. Ullman has been president of
the Parapsychological Association and the Gardner Murphy Research Institute,
was president of the ASPR from 1971 to 1980 and served on its Board of Trustees
and Medical Section. He is now clinical professor of psychiatry emeritus at
Albert Einstein College of Medicine. - A.S.B.

Autobiographical Notes - Montague Ullman

As everyone who wears glasses
knows, as we grow older we have to keep changing lenses to adapt to the
changing structure of the eye. If we don't our view of the world loses its
clarity and accuracy. The same with memory. If we don't enrich our capacity for
reflecting on the past through emotional growth, then those experiences of the
past remain impaled on the narrow vision that first greeted them. This is what
strikes me as, nearing 72 (I was born in New York City on September 9, 1916), 1 write about my life with a public in mind. I find it best to begin with the end
and use that to point to earlier events in my life.

Family pressures as well as my
own aspirations drew me to medicine. An accidental exposure to the world of
psychic phenomena while in college oriented me to the mysteries of the
unconscious realm of existence, including our dream life. My background in
neurology oriented me to the neurophysiology of dreaming; my exposure to
psychoanalysis as a student and a practitioner oriented me to the metaphorical
structure and healing potential of the dream, and my work in community
psychiatry impressed upon me the importance of identifying and sharing the
skills necessary to make dreams generally accessible. Hovering in the
background throughout all these ex­periences was my fascination with the
paranormal. The latter acted as a kind of Greek chorus, reminding me then and
now of how much we still did not know about dreaming and the unconscious
dimensions of our existence.

Since I have become more content
with and more tolerant of myself I feel better able to dislodge some of the
earlier encrusted views of my past. The first such view had to do with the way
I felt about my parents as I grew up, best summed up by saying that I felt at
odds with them. I grew up rejecting their world of bourgeois, religious, commercial
values. Though it might have been less painful otherwise, it was the distance
between us that also made it possible for me to follow my own path.

Both my parents were first
generation Americans who were born and brought up on the lower east side of New
York City. My father's father, Samuel Ullman, came to America at the age of
14 from Hungary. His life was a success story I never got to know or
appreciate. By the time I was born he was the head of a successful
manufacturing concern along with his oldest son, my father William, who, I was
told, was a superb salesman, and with his youngest son, Max. Next in age to my
father was Sol, who became a lawyer, and a younger son, Martin, who was a
commercial artist. The two youngest children were daughters, Doris and Minnie.
I was already launched in the private practice of psychiatry at the time my
grandfather died at the age of 81. 1 recall him as a serious, quiet man toward
whom everyone showed the utmost respect. He spoke only when necessary. He was
deeply religious and most of the family oc­casions revolved around the Sabbath
and the various Jewish holidays. I was the oldest grandchild and I knew he took
great pride in my accomplishments. He was, however, a very distant figure. My
feelings toward him were tinged with a sense of guilt as I grew away from the
Jewish traditions and began to embrace left wing causes, a far cry from the
staunch Republicanism that seemed so much a part of the family tradition.

My father's mother, Katie
Grossman, was a different story. A beautiful woman, she was also a
"sport." Her place, of course, was relegated to the home and there
she was warm, welcoming and nurturing. There was a side of her that managed to
escape the "old man's" surveillance. She loved to smoke and play
cards and occasionally she would sneak off for holidays to enjoy the baths at
Saratoga. I enjoyed her company, her food, her generous spirit.

My mother's parents came from
Poland. My grandfather, Herschel Eisler, became a tailor, earned a meager
living, lived to a ripe old age and had a wonderful sense of humor. What
intrigued me as a child was that he had an artificial leg and, although I knew
him into my adult years, I never did discover what caused it. My grandmother
died sometime during my adolescence and I have only a hazy recollection of her.
The Ullman family, being successful, began to move upward, literally, going
first to the Bronx and then to the upper west side of New York along with other
prosperous middle class families. My mother's family consisted of an older
brother, William, and two younger sisters, Esther and Estelle. They remained on
the east side and we began to see less and less of them as my mother became
more and more involved with my father's family.

My father was generous to a
fault and loved high living. He smoked heavily, drank, overate and, to the
despair of my mother, gambled as well. He died in 1935 on his 44th birthday of
a coronary. I was then in my second year of medical school. The day he died,
synchronistically enough, the lesson in our pathology course was on coronary
occlusion. My sister Jean was 16 at the time and my brother, Robert, was 13.

My mother, Nettie, was a very
conventional person, eager to be accepted into my father's family. She was a
superb cook and baker but given to hysterical anxiety at the slightest
provocation. She was irresistibly drawn to babies and small children but didn't
do so well when the child's struggles to individuate itself began. My fondest
memories of her had to do with the wonderful food she plied us with. Much as I
resented her great need to "show off" her children, it also bolstered
my ego. My father was the focus of her life and she never quite recovered from
the shock of his death. My Uncle Martin took an active interest in the family
following my father's death. I felt a special closeness toward him. He
inherited my grandmother's capacity to enjoy life.

As far as I can remember I never
saw my mother or father ever read a book. But my father's best friend did read
and became the first inspirational figure in my life. He was Dr. Irving
Krellenstein, our family doctor and a very comforting presence when we were
ill. He would overcome our apprehension with the songs he made up as he
examined us and the way he made us laugh. He had a high brow which seemed to
follow the same shape as the stethoscope he wore. I thought that, in order to
be a doctor, you had to have a brow like that. Aside from my grandfather he was
the only man I believe my father had a deep respect for. He often came to our
house for a Sabbath dinner. He made me feel that being a doctor was special,
something apart from and above the world of business.

At the time I started school,
the public school system was so overcrowded that a rapid advance system was
instituted in order to move students along quickly. This, in addition to the
fact that I attended a three year high school (Townsend Harris Hall), resulted
in my enrollment in City College just prior to my fifteenth birthday. I was
bright enough to handle the work but inside I felt like the immature child I
was. I wanted very much to get into medical school and to get the grades
necessary for admission. The competition was severe. Classes numbered over a
thousand in each year at City College and it seemed to me that most students were
taking pre-med courses. My father so wanted me to become a doctor that, despite
some resistance and shame on my part, he was not above using influence to ease
my admission into medical school at New York University at the end of my third
year at college. I had good marks, but so had hundreds of others and I have
often wondered whether I would have made it on my own.

The first two years at medical
school were difficult. My classmates were older, seemed far more self-possessed
and far less fearful of failure than I was. There was, however, a deep
satisfaction that came from the fascination of the subject matter and the
prestige of being a medical student. At the start of my final year, in the
autumn of 1937, I met my future wife, Janet Simon. Court­ship was on and off
for the next four years, mostly because of my not knowing my own mind. We were
married at her home in Brooklyn on January 26, 1941, at the onset of my
residency in neurology. Janet, her family and her home pro­vided the warm
setting I so badly needed. She taught piano and was the source of our income
during my residency years when I earned very little.

At medical school my interest
gravitated toward both neurology (I loved watching two masters, E.D. Friedman
and Foster Kennedy, do neurological ex­aminations) and psychiatry (where Paul
Schilder gave off philosophical as well as psychological sparks in response to
any question put to him). With Schilder as our guiding spirit several other
students and I managed to get a Medical Psychology Club started. Among those
invited to speak were many who later made important contributions to
psychiatry, e.g., Joseph Wortis and Nathaniel Ross.

A graduation gift from my
grandfather enabled me to spend six weeks in the Soviet Union in the summer of
1938 in the company of two distinguished medical historians - Henry E. Sigerist
and Victor Robinson, along with several other doctors, a young lawyer and
Sigerist's daughter. Earlier, Sigerist had written a book favorable to the
Soviet health system and, as a consequence, we received a warm welcome as we
travelled the length and breadth of the land, visiting medical institutions,
research centers, collective farms and fac­tories. I was impressed medically
with what had been accomplished through public health programs and,
politically, with the vision of what seemed to me to be the start of a new and
progressive society built on socialist principles. On the way home I spent a
day in Berlin where, on a sightseeing trip, in response to a question, the
guide denied that Jews were being mistreated in any way. Then followed an
exciting week in Paris just before returning home. While there I managed to be
in the audience at the Sorbonne when the aging Pierre Janet delivered a
lecture.

Upon my return from this trip I
kept up a relationship with Victor Robin­son who taught medical history at
Temple University at the time. He was a pro­lific writer, turning out very
readable and scholarly books on the leading medical figures of the past. These
were books that should have but have not found a place in the current medical
curricula. A gentle man with a pixieish quality, he plied me with his writings
and touched off in me a zeal for writing.

In January 1939, I began four
years of hospital training, the first two in a medical internship (Morrisania
City Hospital), followed by a year of residency in neurology (Montefiore
Hospital), then a year as a psychiatric resident at the New York State
Psychiatric Institute. At the end of that year I was called into the Army. I
reported for duty as a medical officer in December of 1942 at the Lawson
General Hospital in Atlanta. After several months I was transferred to the
Kennedy General Hospital in Memphis, where our first child, Susan, was born
that June. I remained at Kennedy for a year, serving both as a neurologist and
a psychiatrist. Then followed a year and a half abroad in general hospitals,
first in England and later in Paris. I returned to the States in December 1945,
opened an office, at first for the practice of neurology and psychiatry, then
drifting into psychoanalytic practice as I completed training in that sub­speciality
at the New York Medical College. In 1946 our second child, William, was born.

In 1950 I joined the faculty of
the Comprehensive Course in Psychoanalysis at the New York Medical College. The
next ten years were devoted to teaching, to practice and to various research
endeavors. The latter included a project that explored the relationship of
suggestion and the cure of warts, a study undertaken at the invitation of Dr. Marion
B. Sulzberger, then head of the Dermatology Department of New York University.
Subsequent to that I was a research psychiatrist on a multidisciplinary study
of stroke patients at Bellevue Hospital.

I embarked on my psychoanalytic
career in 1942 with Bernard Robbins as my analyst. I found him a remarkably
sensitive, insightful and supportive therapist and regretted having to
interrupt analysis during the three years of army service. Robbins had been
analyzed by Harry Stack Sullivan and Karen Homey. Influenced by his ideas I
felt more at home with the "culturalists," those who broke from the
emphasis on instinct theory to take a closer look at interpersonal and social
influences. Robbins was a man of original and pro­gressive views because of
which he, along with a number of other analysts, broke with the New York
Psychoanalytic Society to develop training centers of their own. Robbins helped
found one such center at the New York Medical College, and it was there that I
entered into formal psychoanalytic training in 1946, following my return to
civilian life. In 1950 I was made a member of the psychoanalytic faculty. I
taught there until 1961 when I terminated my private practice to develop a
department of psychiatry at what was then known as Maimonides Hospital (later
the Maimonides Medical Center). Our last child, Lucy, was born in 1951, shortly
after we moved to our present home in Ardsley, New York.

Since the focus of these
autobiographical notes is my lifelong interest in psychic phenomena I should like
to go back to September 1932, at the start of my sophomore year at the City
College of New York. I had just turned 16, knew nothing about psychical
research and was studying hard to prepare for admission to medical school.
Early in my second year a friend and classmate, Leonard Lauer, confided in me
the story of his personal encounter with psychic phenomena. After explaining
the term to me he shared the basis for his convic­tion. He had read the early
literature and reeled off strange names to me­ - Lombroso,
Schrenck-Notzing, Flammarion, F.W.H. Myers, Oliver Lodge, T.J. Hudson, William
Crookes and, finally, William James. More important, he had been party to and
had witnessed some of the extraordinary phenomena he had read about.

I took Leonard Lauer seriously.
He was also a science major and fancied himself a hard nosed scientist. At the
home of his friend Gilbert Roller, he had witnessed table movement and
knockings when he, Gilbert and another friend named Larry (Gilbert Laurence)
sat around a small table in the dark in a seance arrangement. They had been
sitting for many weeks and were convinced that the effects were not of their
own making. Several years earlier poltergeist effects had plagued Gilbert and
his family and Gilbert's mother was said to be a medium. The group met every
Saturday night and I was invited to join. In ad­dition to my exposure to the
literature, what I witnessed was to make me a psychic researcher for the rest
of my life. For the next year and a half I, along with the others, devoted
Saturday evenings to what rapidly evolved into a very serious project.

At various times I have tried to
write an account of these experiences. The first was in the form of an essay
for a philosophy course I was taking at the time. What follows are some
excerpts from that essay written in 1932:

The first
phenomena we developed goes by the name of telekinesis, or super-normal
movement of objects not due to any known force. In these ex­periments we (four
of us) used an ordinary bridge table, keeping contact with the table and with
each other by our hands. The room is usually light enough to allow us to see
what is taking place. After a few moments the table would start to move and
distinct knockings are heard, seemingly coming from beneath the table. One of
the sitters gives commands (it is immaterial who does the talking as long as
all the others are thinking along with him) and the response is almost
instantaneous. The table moves to the one whose name is mentioned. We then
managed to get the table to tilt in whichever direction we asked. After
continued experiments of this type we finally decided to get this unknown force
to elevate the table. Early attempts in this direction all ended in failure.
One night, however, we were thrilled by the sight of the table rising from
beneath our hands to the height of two or more feet! We repeated this and were
successful at subsequent trials. Once, when the table was elevated we each
individually removed our hands from its surface. To our astonishment the table
remained suspended in mid-air for about two seconds before collapsing to the
ground. Encouraged by this success we kept trying. The height of our
accomplishment with telekinesis was an experiment in which we made the table
come up to our hands which we held about two feet above it. (We had always
found success without contact of the hands rather difficult).

"We
gradually became so accustomed to the table motion that it no longer interested
us. Our efforts then turned to the field of photography. I should like to note
a curious experience we had in this connection. In our first attempt we took a
photographic plate and placed it in a tin case (in this posi­tion it could not
be affected by any physical force). The plate was placed on the table with one
of the sitter's hands resting on it. The room was absolutely dark during the
entire process and the usual contact was maintained. After several minutes we
put the plate aside, thinking it would not be worth developing as we felt it
was impossible for the plate to be affected. We then went back to the table and
asked the 'force' to give us a message, if there were any, by knocking after
the appropriate letter in the alphabet as it was called off by one of the
sitters. In this way the word 'P-L-A-T-E' was spelled out. We immediately
developed the plate and, sure enough, there was a distinct im­print of the
hand. We repeated the procedure and got several other imprints, not only of
hands, but of any object we placed on the metal case that held the plate.
Thought photographs were the next step. Below is a list of the ob­jects we
thought about and the objects received on the plate [numbered as in the
original positives]:

Objects thought about

Objects received

5. Page from a book

Column from a newspaper

1. Bottle (large, corkless,
labelless)

Small, corked iodine bottle
with label

6. Message

The letter "C"

4. Picture of a girl's face

Indian idol

"A brief
explanation of the above experiments is necessary. In the first we got a
picture of an ordinary newspaper column and managed to make out some of the
words. In the second the bottle on the plate was entirely different from the
one we thought about. We got an iodine bottle that was later found in the
medicine chest in the bathroom. In the fourth try we thought about a certain
girl, but it seems that during this sitting one of the members could think of
nothing but Indians. The only possible object suggested by the image on the
plate is an Indian idol.... In one of the rooms we later found a small souvenir
which was the exact shape of the image on the plate. None of the sitters had
been thinking of this idol; only one of them had ever seen it before and that
was several years before.

"At the
first photographic sitting I accidentally performed an experiment which
convinced me that there was no trickery at all in the matter. While one of the
sitters had his hands on the case that contained the plate I placed my thumb over
his hand and an imprint of my thumb came out on the plate negative. If
the plates had been fixed beforehand (they could not have been handled after
the sitting because I, myself, developed them), this would not have
happened."

There were many more remarkable
events which followed the writing of the above account. These included a series
of written messages purporting to come from someone identifying himself as Dr.
Bindelof, a physician who had died in 1919 but who made known his continuing
desire to be of help to us in both a fatherly and a healing way. These writings
were obtained without anyone touching the pencil. Sitting about a night table
with our hands in con­tact above we had placed a pencil and paper on the lower
shelf. Soon after the lights were turned off the pencil would start writing at
a furious rate. At the completion of the message it would be slammed down and
the paper crumpled.

In the full flush of these
exciting results Leonard and I took our case to the ASPR, then located in the
Hyslop House at 23 Street and Lexington Avenue in New York City. There we
related our experiences to Frederick Bligh Bond, then editor of the Journal.
He listened with polite interest. In the 1933 account I wrote I seemed to have
felt somewhat positive about the visit. When, much later, I checked with
Leonard, his recollection was that he came away feeling disappointed at what he
felt was a cool reception.

Sittings continued with other
friends, including girl friends, joining us from time to time until the spring
of 1934 when the group finally disbanded. Until then the group sat regularly,
usually at weekly intervals, over the course of a year and a half. In summary,
we experienced a gradual and climactic un­folding of almost the full gamut of
psychical phenomena as such phenomena were known and defined by writers on the
subject in the 19th and early 20th century. The developmental sequence led to
such startling phenomena as levitation of a table, messages purportedly written
by someone who had died and photographs taken without exposure of the plates.
Heady stuff for a group of 16 and 17 year olds! Either that or mere foolishness
and nonsense.

In the spring of 1966 I
succeeded in bringing together five of the original group that had participated
in the seances in the thirties. The purpose was to compare our recollection of
these sittings, to assist each other in filling the gaps in our memories, to
establish areas of consensual agreement as to what had ac­tually taken place,
and to define those aspects of the experience where the passage of time made
any semblance of accurate reconstruction impossible. The events in question
were extraordinary both at the time they occurred and in their lasting impact
over the years. The meeting took place that summer on a Saturday. It was a day
devoted to the boisterous recapturing of what was the strangest and most
powerful experience of our youth. The phenomena struck us back then and also
subsequently as inexplicable, as truly paranormal. Any differences among us
concerned interpretations of the nature of the paranor­mal event and not about
the fact that it was paranormal. Because we could neither explain it away nor
seriously consider a 33-year sustained fraud, joke or deception by any member
of the group or any combination thereof, we ac­cepted it collectively as a
compelling and powerful aspect of our respective lives. We subsequently had
several reunions of this sort in the hope that some day a full account would
emerge.

It is not an unusual
psychological event for middle-aged men to seize on any pretext to regress to
an adolescence they never completely outgrew. It happens at football games and
at college reunions. Perhaps these dynamics played a role in what happened on
that Saturday in 1966 or on the other occasions when, after many years of
separation, we came together to reexamine the events that had welded us into a
group in the first place. Within a few moments of being together we again began
to re-experience passionately and intensely the harrowing and exciting times we
had had earlier. It wasn't simply reliving the experiences of our lost youth.
It was a good deal more than that. It was re-encounter with an aspect of our
existence that, while still mysterious and inexplicable, was enduringly real
for each of us.

What was undeniable was the deep
and lasting impact these experiences had on the direction my life took. Despite
periods when they were in cold storage (when I tried to learn how to view the
world scientifically during my medical training and during service in World War
II) they were never com­pletely submerged. It would only take the sympathetic
interest of another per­son to open the locked closet. Even while in the army
and stationed at a hospital outside of Paris I managed to get three fellow
medical officers in­terested in conducting a number of seances, unfortunately
with no results.

The most sympathetic ear I ever
encountered in connection with my early psychic experiences was that of Gardner
Murphy. One of the first things I did in December of 1945, while on terminal
leave, was to visit the ASPR whose headquarters were then at 34th Street. I
happened to pick a day when there was an elevator strike and had to climb
eleven stories to the offices. It was well worth it. Murphy was there, made
himself available and quietly listened as I poured out the entire story of my
earlier encounter with psychic phenomena. It was the start of what proved to be
a deep and lasting relationship.

Soon after I opened my office we
began to collaborate in informal weekly sessions on Saturdays that aimed at
exploring ESP under conditions of light trance and hypnosis. Our subjects were
students from Gardner's courses at City College. We took turns as
experimenters. Gardner and I would meet for lunch beforehand and I used those
occasions to share with him the paranormal dreams I had encountered with my
patients the preceding week. These lunches were memorable. Gardner listened
with rapt attention to these accounts. He was supportive, never challenging
and, at times, would call attention to historical parallels. He was always in
pursuit of some objectifiable evidence of psi but it never dampened his
enthusiasm for its spontaneous manifestations. I know he was concerned with
some way of objectifying the data we were getting in the exploratory studies we
were doing with the students. I'm afraid his gentle exhortation fell on deaf
ears. Quantitative methods were not my dish of tea.

Lois Murphy often joined us at
these Saturday sessions and she soon began to participate on a regular basis.
She had a flair for it. Her ability to zero in on the target while, at the same
time, to observe and articulate what she was going through was most impressive.
It sparked my hope for a developmental approach for cultivating ESP. The work
with Lois went on from the end of 1947 to the beginning of 1949. The work with
the students went on for a year or so but with no spectacular successes.

With Lois, however, something of
interest did happen, something that shed light on her inner mental processes as
she sought to respond to the target picture. She identified two distinct
stages. The first was a passive one that she referred to as free wheeling. She
would let images come and go, trying to keep any voluntary control or
interfering thoughts at a minimum. She would draw one image after another while
keeping up a running commentary. Sometimes there was a clustering of images
with obvious similarities; sometimes there were no obvious connections. Where
the impressions took a distinct form she would name the object that seemed to
be forming in her mind. This brought her to the second stage where, because of
the perseveration of certain forms and im­pressions, she would come to a felt
impression of what she thought the target was. She referred to this as
focussing. Not infrequently her conceptualization of the image was wrong but
the forms she drew came closer and closer to the forms suggested by the target
as she went on with them. The trick was to keep her ego out of it - to push
aside such thoughts as, "Oh, it couldn't be this; we had that target last
week."

Another rather definite and
striking finding was that Lois was sensitive to the "soft" or
"hard" quality of the target picture. She shied away from pictures
that suggested aggression, violence, hardness, etc., doing better with pictures
drawn from nature, babies, food, etc. She did better with "soft"
targets than with "neutral" targets (bicycle, boat, etc.). Also worth
noting was the impor­tance of her antecedent mood prior to the experimental
session. She was always given the opportunity before we started to talk freely
about this.

This was my introduction to
experimental parapsychology. The work was informal, exploratory and relatively
loose but it was congenial to Gardner, Lois and myself in our pursuit of both
objective and subjective factors related to ESP. We worked largely with free
hand drawings with the subject, whether Lois or one of Gardner's students,
lying on the couch in varying stages of relaxa­tion and trance. The most
interesting results occurred with Lois and not, as might have been expected,
with students even when deeply hypnotized. The Murphys' move to Topeka
terminated these meetings but the cross fertilization continued. When, in 1961,
I gave up private practice to become director of the department of psychiatry
at the Maimonides Hospital, it was Gardner who ob­tained the grant that
initiated our explorations into dreams and telepathy.

Gardner had a way with young
people. True to his given name he offered the right combination of support and
stimulation needed to fertilize the ger­minal ideas of others. Many people are
well read, but Gardner seemed to have read everything and to have everything he
read immediately available when relevant to the question at hand. His way of
roaming freely over his past reading recovered for others much of value and
helped to fit things into broad overarching theoretical structures. More
personally he fullfilled my need for a respected and respectful mentor. He
shared his books and writings with me and from that came a deep appreciation
for the range of his knowledge, the humility with which it was set forth and
his genuine openness and responsiveness to all that was human. He was the most
selfless person I had ever known.

My contacts at the ASPR soon led
me to a growing friendship with Laura Dale. Laura was deeply devoted to
Gardner, to the ASPR and to the field of psychical research in general. There
were many troubled sides to Laura's makeup but she managed to rise above them
as she set about singlemindedly to make the Journal of the ASPR the
repository of the finest theoretical and experimental contributions to parapsychology.
In this she succeeded admirably. Knowing the field as she did and being a
meticulous worker she was about as perfect an editor as one could be. Our
friendship grew both through our mutual interest in the ASPR and through the
secretarial work she did for me in the late fifties. She was an expert
stenotypist which made dictating easy. I have never known anyone else who could
turn out manuscripts as rapidly and as perfectly. Later Laura did most of the
editorial work for the Handbook of Parapsychology.

Laura, Gardner and I went
together on one rather fanciful adventure in Maine to see if dowsers could do
better than the Maine state geologist in finding underground water. They didn't
but they did give us insights into unusual and colorful personalities.

In the early fifties all we knew
about the physiology of dreams was that they occurred from time to time during
the night. With the idea of a dream-telepathy experiment in mind in this
pre-REM era I enlisted Laura's cooperation in planning a series of exploratory
experiments, using a gadget known as a dormiphone. It could be set to awaken
the sleeper at various intervals throughout the night and deliver a recorded
message. Laura and I then set about recording our dreams, she most often acting
as the recipient and I as the sender. We experimented with different stimuli on
the tape from nonsense syllables to meaningful names and phrases, hoping that
they would stimulate a dream. We also kept diary notes oriented to recording
any emotionally charged events in our lives. We met weekly at my home, Laura
driving up with her prize-winning dogs. There was much excitement as we
compared dreams and diary notes. The results were encouraging enough for us to
stay with it for several years. They also paved the way for the more formal
dream-telepathy studies I undertook at Maimonides.

We never did succeed in
quantifying the mass of data we accumulated although Laura Dale made a valiant
attempt. It wasn't in my nature to do it nor do I think we would have captured
what was the essence of the experience, namely, the subtle and subjective
factors at play.

At Murphy's invitation I joined
the Board of the ASPR in 1948 and re­mained a trustee until 1986. At the time I
joined, George H. Hyslop was presi­dent, later succeeded by Murphy. The
situation in psychical research has changed considerably since those early
days. In the forties the ASPR was the only agency oriented to both research and
to the maintenance of the scientific image of psychic research in the minds of
the public. It flourished under Murphy's leadership. In the late forties he
encouraged Laura and me to set up a Medical Section of the Society so that
those psychiatrists who were gathering examples of paranormal dreams could meet
to share their experiences. The participants in this endeavor, which lasted
until 1953, included, in addition to Laura and myself, Jan Ehrenwald, Jule
Eisenbud, Robert Laidlaw, Geraldine Pedersen­-Krag, Gotthard Booth, Adelaide
Smith and, from time to time, invited guests. Among the latter were Fritz
Wittels and Hyman Spotnitz.

The decade from 1950 to 1960 was
one in which I was involved with the three major interests in my life
- the exciting new approaches to psychoanalytic thinking and practice, a
growing interest in dreams, and my efforts to bring my interest in the
paranormal into the mainstream of my life. By day I was busy with my practice
and research projects at Bellevue Hospital with stroke patients (a study of
symbolic and behavioral changes in patients with strokes), and later at the old
Skin and Cancer Unit of Bellevue with a study of suggestion and warts. In the
latter half of the decade I began what turned out to be a ten year federally
funded project at the Skidmore College of Nursing with the goal of integrating
psychiatry into a collegiate nursing program.

In 1953 Aserinsky and Kleitman
monitored sleeping subjects in a sleep laboratory electroencephically and
electrooculographically. They discovered what we now know as the REM stage of
sleep associated with the dreaming cycle. A young graduate student, William
Dement, participated in the work. Several years later he came to New York to
intern at the Mount Sinai Hospital. About that time I conceived of the idea of
using this monitoring technique to collect the dreams of sleeping subjects in a
controlled dream telepathy experi­ment. Could a sleeping subject produce
telepathic dreams relating to target material being "sent" by an
experimenter under circumstances where we could now collect all the dreams of a
given night and compare them to the targets which were either free hand
drawings or striking photographs?

With Dr. Dement on the scene I
arranged for a meeting with Eileen Gar­rett sometime in 1959. Robert Laidlaw
had introduced me to Eileen some years before and I had had several
experimental sessions with her at my office where, in her self-induced trance
state, one or the other of her controls would speak. On the occasion referred
to in 1959 Dement outlined the sleep monitoring procedure and I presented the
design of an experiment for exploring ESP in dreams. Eileen responded
favorably. She placed two rooms of the Para­psychology Foundation at the
disposal of Karlis Osis, Douglas Dean and myself and provided the necessary
funds to buy an electroencephalograph and hire a technician to run it through
the night. Douglas arranged the intercom system so that we could awaken the
subject (generally a friend, student or colleague I could dragoon into
cooperating) at the time of dreaming.

Our plan was to awaken the
subject after each dreaming episode as noted on the electroencephalogram and
then ask for a report on any dreams. These were recorded on tape and later
transcribed. We were guided by our subjective impressions as to whether any
interesting correspondences had occurred be­tween what we had chosen as target
material and the dreams. Eileen Garrett was our first subject and she produced
a spectacular hit as well as an unusual electroencephalogram, the latter never
dipping much below the level of the Stage I REM dreaming phase of the sleep
cycle. Later, Gardner also volunteered as a subject. The repeated awakenings
made return to sleep difficult for him and nothing noteworthy occurred. I was
generally the sender during these sessions and initially I preferred working
with free hand drawings made in the course of the night. Later, prepared
targets of photographs were used and chosen randomly. We were impressed with
the number of striking correspondences that were obtained over the two year
period we worked together.

The early exploratory work with
Laura Dale, followed by the efforts of Karlis Osis, Douglas Dean and myself to
use the REM monitoring technique as a way of capturing a good yield of the
night's dreaming, thus facilitating an investigation into dream telepathy, played
an important role in my decision to give up private practice in favor of a full
time position in a hospital and the opportunity to shape a research program
devoted solely to the pursuit of that elusive quarry, the paranormal dream. I
remain grateful to Eileen Garrett and the Parapsychology Foundation for setting
me on that course.

Within the first year of that
transition in 1961 Gardner arranged a grant from the Scaife and Ittelson
Foundations, administered through the good graces of the Menninger Foundation,
which enabled me to set up the begin­nings of a laboratory. We didn't really
get moving along the lines of a systematic approach until Stanley Krippner
joined our staff the next year with the responsibility to develop the research
methodology. Stan had been at Kent State University and was ready to make a
move. Gardner got wind of this and, knowing that I was looking for someone to
head up the laboratory, sent him east to Brooklyn and the beginning of a
productive collaboration. At a later point Charles Honorton joined our staff
and took over from Stan when he left to join what is now the Saybrook
Institute.

Stan was instrumental in working
out what we felt was a foolproof design for the experimental approach we had in
mind (a design which has withstood the test of time) to bring telepathic and
precognitive dreaming into the laboratory. The results have been dealt with
extensively elsewhere. They are admirably summarized along with the subsequent
replication studies and a critique of the critics in a recent article by Irvin
Child ("Psychology and Anomalous Observations," American
Psychologist, 40, 11 [Nov. 1985], 1219-1230). All in all we felt we had
made a successful start in subjecting the paranormal dream to laboratory
investigation. The positive statistical studies we obtained in 9 of the 12
formal studies we conducted supported the hypothesis that altered states of
consciousness, such as dreaming and hypnosis, can be associated with telepathic
and precognitive effects. Subsequent to Stan's departure Charles Honorton went
on, through his Ganzfeld studies, to further explore the relationship of
altered states and psi.

In 1970 I had six months off on
a sabbatical leave from my duties at the hospital and medical school (the
Downstate Medical Center). Janet and I had planned a trip that was to include
visits to the socialist countries for the purpose of exploring their version of
psi research. I was to go on to lecture and teach in Israel, India, Japan and
Hawaii. Unfortunately, two months into the trip, Janet became ill and we had to
return home. I nevertheless did see what I wanted to in the Soviet Union,
Czechoslovakia and Bulgaria. In Moscow Ed­ward Naumov gave me an overview of
what was going on there and arranged a lecture for me. I also spent time with
Dr. Raikov and was impressed with his way of using hypnosis to facilitate the
emergence of musical and artistic talent in young people. The most exciting
feature of the visit to the Soviet Union was the week we spent in Leningrad
where, through the help of Dr. Sergeyev, I met Nina Kulagina and witnessed
several striking psychokinetic efforts per­formed by her in my hotel room.

Zdenek Rejdak was our host in
Czechoslovakia. One evening, while in Prague, we witnessed, along with another
parapsychologist from the States, Thelma Moss, some of the experiments of a
Czech engineer named Pavlita, who purported to show it was possible to store
psychic energy in special metal configurations he had designed and then later,
to release that energy to pro­duce telekinetic effects. We were shown how a
small wooden object, a match stick, for example, could be affected by one of
these metal objects and made to move. Being there as visitors we could not
validate the effect for ourselves. The entire encounter was shrouded in secrecy
and no details or explanations were forthcoming. This encounter was quite
different from my meetings with Sergeyev and Kulagina. Sergeyev responded
openly to my questions, shared the data he had and told us about the many
interesting results he had had with Kulagina.

In Sofia, Bulgaria, I managed a
number of visits at Dr. Lozanov's rapid learning institute and there, too, I
was impressed with his ability to use relaxa­tion techniques to expedite
learning languages and school projects with greater speed and less stress than
might be expected.

In addition to my interest in
the work of the Dream Laboratory at Maimonides and the task of securing the
funds necessary to keep it operative, my main professional duties related to
the Department of Psychiatry and the development and operation of a community
mental health center. The latter came into being in 1967 and was noteworthy for
the many innovative com­munity programs it launched in its approach to the
challenge of preventive psychiatry. As these undertakings grew I found myself
involved in administrative responsibilities that made it more and more
difficult to pursue my interest in research and teaching, both of which I found
more to my liking.

In 1974 the opportunity I had
been waiting for to return to teaching arrived. It was an invitation to me and
another psychoanalyst from New York, the late Adolfo Caccheiro, to train
Swedish psychology students and other pro­fessionals in psychodynamically
oriented psychotherapy. The students had taken their basic courses at the
Psychological Institute of the University of Gothenburg and had now organized
their own institute for training and clinical experience. I was more than ready
for the change and responded eagerly to the invitation. I stayed in Sweden for
a year and a half, feeling drawn to the country and to the students I worked
with. In the course of teaching about dreams my present way of working with
dreams in groups evolved. This was based upon an experiential approach that
brought home to the students in a direct and personal way the creativity of the
dream, the information embedded in the imagery, and the healing potential of
dream work.

Ever since my return to the
States in 1976 I have continued to visit Sweden in the fall and spring for
about two months at a time to teach and supervise students. Gradually more of
my time there was devoted to group dream work at various hospitals and
psychotherapy training centers. The demand for this type of training developed
far beyond my expectations. I soon began to train Swedish professionals as well
as nonprofessionals in the technique of leading a dream group. There are now
many who are well-trained and are leading groups in almost all the major
Swedish cities. Over the past three years the work has spread to Norway and
Denmark.

My travels in Scandinavia
afforded me an opportunity to meet those who were engaged in psychical research
there. Rolf Ejvegard has made valiant efforts to keep serious interest in
parapsychological research alive in Sweden. He was and is still instrumental in
maintaining a scientific point of view in his tenure as president of the
Swedish Society for Psychical Research.

Another after-effect of my
experience in Sweden was my enthusiasm for group dream work. The process I had
developed there I found suitable, not only as a training instrument for
professional therapists, but also as a way of making dream work accessible to
the interested layman. On my return I joined two faculties, the Albert Einstein
College of Medicine and the Westchester Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis
and Psychotherapy, for the purpose of teaching therapists in training about
dreams experientially in a group setting. In addition I developed private
groups and leadership training groups open to anyone interested in this
approach. The work in this country thus paralleled my work abroad.

As this work developed I became
more and more convinced that serious and effective dream work could extend
beyond the consulting room and into the community. Since dreaming is a
universal and natural event, access to the resulting dreams should be
universal. For this to occur it takes a proper naturalistic setting where the
skills involved can be identified and shared and where metapsychological
concepts are jettisoned in favor of an understanding of the basic
phenomenologic features of the dream.

I succeeded Gardner Murphy as
president of the ASPR in 1971. I sought to keep the Society on the same course
that he had embarked upon. Difficult financial years followed so that increasing
deficit spending made it hard to maintain all the programs we had started. In
addition, many of the differences among members of the Board around the aims
and goals of the Society, differences that had simmered under the surface
during Murphy's term of office, were more out in the open and not always easy
to contain. Laura Dale continued to do an excellent job as editor of the Journal.
Karlis Osis managed to pursue his studies of apparitions, out-of-body
experiences and spontaneous cases despite the dwindling financial support, and
Marian Nester succeeded in developing a range of services offered by the
Education Department, including the very well received ASPR Newsletter.
The management of the administrative affairs of the Society were in the
competent hands of Fanny Knipe.

In the early seventies the
outlook for research in parapsychology was a most precarious one. The various
young parapsychologists scattered around the country were having a difficult
financial struggle to maintain their full time commitment to parapsychology.
They had the hope that, by coming together, they might have a catalytic effect
on each other and also work out the strategies necessary to solve the problems
they were facing. I was asked to head the newly formed organization which was
named the Gardner Murphy Research In­stitute. We met yearly with Gardner in
attendance until the onset of his illness. Although these meetings deepened
personal and professional ties and, in some instances, fostered conjoint
studies, it never got much beyond that and was finally dissolved.

In 1980 I resigned as president
of the ASPR and from the Board in 1986. The late Arthur Twitchell succeeded me
as president, followed by Gertrude Schmeidler, whose deep and longstanding
commitment to parapsychology served the Society well. She was succeeded in turn
by Howard Zimmerman, an able administrator and someone dedicated to the
exploration of the full range of implications of psychical research. Earlier,
Howard's wife, Nan, had collaborated with me on our book, Working with
Dreams.

As I look back it seems to me
that I have had the good fortune to have had three very different kinds of
encounters with psi phenomena. As an adoles­cent I was exposed to the range of
seance room phenomena that characterized an earlier epoch of psychic research.
As a psychoanalyst my interest was re­kindled as patients related dreams that
struck me as telepathic. This was the direct precursor to my efforts to
approach the problem of the paranormal dream experimentally.

In more recent years I have in
some ways combined what I learned from these three levels of experience in
exploratory studies conducted at the ASPR, making use of a group approach to
dream sharing which involved going beyond surface correspondences to get at
underlying motivational dynamics and, through the pursuit of psi events over a
long period of time, allow for incipient psi abilities to develop.

Murphy believed in casting a
wide net in our search for understanding psi. He embraced the old literature as
well as the new, the qualitative as well as the quantitative. It has always
seemed to me that, because of our ignorance, we had much more to learn about
the natural outcropping of psi before we could (if ever) capture its essence in
the laboratory. We have to avoid letting our ignorance constrain our efforts at
exploration. In the recent group experi­ment referred to above we sought to
learn more about the natural human predicaments that bring about a psi event
and how such an event registered in a dream.

I end with the hope that future
researchers will move into the future not only with computers and other
sophisticated technologies but also with the breadth of vision of such pioneers
as Myers, James and Murphy.